PCs can control the amount of encounters / day to a fairly reliable degree.
When attacking the BBEG's base, they can simply retreat once the wizard has expended most of their higher level spells. The BBEG will be unwilling to commit many troops to pursue because he doesn't know the PCs aren't just a diversion. A couple of lower level spells or a scroll can ensure their escape or that they remain undetected. They can then either try a different approach to direct confrontation, or wait a couple of days before attacking again. If the BBEG flees then they have at least inconvenient him and may be able to ambush him or his minions as they retreats.
Varia argued that the BBEG would be willing to commit troops since if the PCs can do damage to him, they are not a diversion. Failing that, he can send his kitchen staff to harass then and prevent them from getting a good night’s sleep. If the PCs force the BBEG to flee they have failed because he is still at large and most loot will be either taken or destroyed.
I was just wondering what others felt about this issue.
A DM can also "conveniently" have reinforcements show up while the PCs are off napping. It's not usually a pure benefit to try and whittle an enemy force down in D&D because the challenge has to be maintained.
He should also plan for their return by setting up traps or arranging his forces better, if not abandoning the base. Or both -- he leaves while the party fights a bunch of contingent forces left behind. A BBEG would likely have enough of an escape plan that they can't just ambush him on the road if he gets a head start.
Of course, if the DM is just running an adventure straight from the book the PCs might get away with that sort of thing, but it's up to the DM how effective such tactics end up being.
EDIT: Most adventures tend to assume PCs don't infiltrate a base as much as go room to room and clear each in turn. With advance warning (like a raid) the enemies should be more organized and able to respond to each other's fights quickly to join in.
I think the PCs can do all that if they want, but likely a BBEG knows them by name if not face and understands their troublesome nature (unless by BBEG you just mean boss in a dungeon).
A DM can also "conveniently" have reinforcements show up while the PCs are off napping. It's not usually a pure benefit to try and whittle an enemy force down in D&D because the challenge has to be maintained.
The problem with that is that if the PCs come up with decent hit and run plan, cover their escape well, then their efforts shouldn't be automatically countered. Its a balance of rewarding character creativity and keeping the challange up.
The one thing that has never happened: the BBEG has never waited patiently in his lair, going about his business and fearing to commit forces to the problem.
The usual response of the BBEG has been to find out what's acting against him and protect himself from it. This has nothing to do with destroying the infiltrators. Mostly it involves getting out of the way, or better yet, directing them into an enemy so the two can come into conflict and weaken each other.
Shortly following this is the plot of revenge. Observation, spying, and divination reveal who the heroes are and what they are up to. The villain lies low while they deal with something else, learns the identity of these new enemies, and uses them to lay an ambush or an elaborate trap.
This assumed the BBEG isn't holding some kind of precious, strategic location, like a mithril mine or an Earth Node or something else immobile of great value. In that case the singular response has been to fortify to the maximum extent and call in some evil outsiders for help.
The problem with that is that if the PCs come up with decent hit and run plan, cover their escape well, then their efforts shouldn't be automatically countered. Its a balance of rewarding character creativity and keeping the challange up.
I didn't mean it as the PCs can never truly reduce enemy forces, but assuming they are intentionally entering one room, clearing it out, then running away and repeating, in the interest of there still being enemies they may have to be repopulated somewhat.
Also, the main problem with the hit and run strategy is that the enemies will be cognizant of it and shouldn't have their guys in convenient chunks of 3-5 soldiers wandering otherwise empty rooms where there are corpses still rotting on the floor from the last time.
It would generally become "Oh no look at us in a convenient bite-sized XP chunk. What should we do if adventurers chase us? Oh yeah, go into the adjacent room where 18 of our friends are setting up an ambush based on this scenario." Unless they're just bugs or something.
...the main problem with the hit and run strategy is that the enemies will be cognizant of it and shouldn't have their guys in convenient chunks of 3-5 soldiers wandering otherwise empty rooms where there are corpses still rotting on the floor from the last time.
It would generally become "Oh no look at us in a convenient bite-sized XP chunk. What should we do if adventurers chase us? Oh yeah, go into the adjacent room where 18 of our friends are setting up an ambush based on this scenario."
This being exactly what a DM should do if the PCs wander away to take an extended rest. It's unlikely that players will be actively campaigning against unintelligent enemies very often - that's just not as interesting. Sure, you can send them against a couple bulettes that have been terrorizing a community, but that'll always be less fun than, say, bulettes used as attack animals by a powerful wizard or druid who wants the community cleared out or is drawing magical power from the death and destruction being caused. This being the case, an intelligent enemy who knows that it is threatened will retreat to a different location, set up traps and harrying ambushes to slow the party, send assassins after the party, call in favors to gain reinforcements, etc. BBEGs played more intelligently than cartoon villains will use smart tactics and take threats seriously.
This isn't to say that players can't influence the number of encounters they'll face between rests. There isn't a tried-and-true way of doing so, and it'll be largely circumstantial and DM-dependent. For example, if your party got really chewed up by an encounter, you can reasonably hope that the DM will cut you some slack in taking a rest. But if you try to use formulaic things like "we retreat, and the bad guys won't follow us because they're too strapped for resources/we're not enough of a threat/we concealed ourselves really well/etc", expect your DM to get annoyed. And the power of an annoyed DM to make a player's life difficult is boundless indeed.
The reason is that my campaign is currently in a city with urban encounters, rather than a more standard dungeon crawl or overworld trek. I have redefined the term "extended rest". While they are in the city, 6 hours of sleep is not an extended rest. Instead an extended rest is any time they let world events move on and equates to roughly a month passing. The caveat here is that their expenses come due any time they take an extended rest (rent, paying their retainers, etc.). So, they can choose to take an extended rest any time it is reasonable (and regain daily powers, healing surges, etc.), but external plots will move on when they do and they will lose gold.
It isn't something I would use all the time, but it is a good way to deal with urban encounters that don't easily fit into a nice 4-6 encounter "work day".
-SYB
Riiiight.
Well, ok, maybe that's how it goes in your worlds. But it's definitely not how it works in mine.
1st comes the condsideration of wether or not the PCs have crossed the BBEGs path before. Is he acquainted with their meddling? If so I've likely had him already commit some resources to dealing with/spying on/finding the PCs.
If he's not aware of them then he now becomes so (degrees vary based on the PCs actions). At least to some extent. Actions taken vrs the PCs on the BBEGs part begin scaling up. If he's got the means he'll scry/divine them out in various ways, send some type of force after them, etc. At the very least he'll up the difficulty of them entering/re-entering his lair....
Just think what you'd do in RL if someone kept trying to break into your house. Obviously if you're aware of it you're not going to just do nothing. No, you're going to take some sort of action.... Now imagine that you were also armed with crysal balls, demonic patron, spell casting abilities, a small army of monsters, no qualms about killing, etc....
Ok, decent plan, right? I let it work because it made sense. Well....he got to abusing it until the cows came home, so I countered by having dire bears attack and slaughter their horses that were tethered below the rope trick. Whoops.
He STILL didn't get it, and the party thought that was a totally rad way of waging guerilla war on a party of bad guys. So.....I had a group of NPCs track them, watch as they set up and disappeared into their pocket plane, went to bed.
Then the NPCs built the mother of all bonfires underneath the rope tricked area, and kept it roaring with felled trees and brush until the duration expired, and everyone took falling AND fire damage.
I have no problem letting my PCs devise ingenious tactics, and using them. Of course, if they start turning into one-trick ponies, I pull out my pony-killing harpoon.
Also, PCs are attacking any group of monsters or bad-guys with ANY sembelance of organization, after the first few hit and runs, the bad guys should get wise, and start setting ambushes or erecting defenses that nullify the previous advantage. Continuing to let the PCs just flog away with a nifty, but ultimately "cheap" trick makes the game boring.
I generally let my players decide when to "call it a day" unless they're intentionally trying to abuse my generosity. One wizard decided that he would just set up rope-trick anytime he took a beating, since you're relatively hard to find in a rope-trick.
Ok, decent plan, right? I let it work because it made sense. Well....he got to abusing it until the cows came home.
He STILL didn't get it, and the party thought that was a totally rad way of waging guerilla war on a party of bad guys. So.....I had a group of NPCs track them, watch as they set up and disappeared into their pocket plane, went to bed.
I have no problem letting my PCs devise ingenious tactics, and using them. Of course, if they start turning into one-trick ponies, I pull out my pony-killing harpoon.
Also, PCs are attacking any group of monsters or bad-guys with ANY semblance of organization, after the first few hit and runs, the bad guys should get wise, and start setting ambushes or erecting defenses that nullify the previous advantage. Continuing to let the PCs just flog away with a nifty, but ultimately "cheap" trick makes the game boring.
+1.
I've never been a fan of the 'Rope Trick solution to resting' from either side of the screen, since before 3.X. It presumes that the NPCs you're infiltrating have: a) no scouts b) no ability to scry in their home turf- including reasonable, level-appropriate countermeasures against preventative screens and c) less resources, intellect, and common sense than the treasure tables and stat blocks indicate.
Scouts (generic, not necessarily the class), should be competent enough at recon to present an appropriate challenge to catch and thwart, and 'I cast Rope Trick, problem solved' ignores that. If the PCs are powerful enough to have scrying devices or spells of their own, appropriately challenging NPCs should have reasonable measures of eluding same, and vice versa. If the PCs are successful in their guerrilla tactics more than ONCE, the BBEG may not 'know that they aren't just a diversion', but he doesn't know that they are just a diversion, either. A BBEG truly paralyzed into inactivity from fear of overcommitment against an established threat isn't one who could have reasonably risen to a leadership role on his own, and as such would make a fairly unbelievable BBEG if he's not been established as a 'new inheritor' of his position.
I've seen more than once where the party that cast Rope Trick woke up to find a fairly large 'welcoming committee' waiting for them to come out and play.
I have no problem letting my PCs devise ingenious tactics, and using them. Of course, if they start turning into one-trick ponies, I pull out my pony-killing harpoon.
I've seen more than once where the party that cast Rope Trick woke up to find a fairly large 'welcoming committee' waiting for them to come out and play.
I think everyone has had some encounter with the much-abused Rope Trick... Mine was in a 3.5 game ages ago. I'd played with our DM for a while, but most of the players were fairly new, and a couple of them were absolute rules lawyer munchkins. They kept trying to talk the DM into prestige classes they found on the internet, if it's any indication. One of them wanted to get divine ranks by 8th level. Anyway, they kept using Rope Trick in admittedly clever ways, like climbing a tree to cast it so that the rope wasn't easily visible from ground level, or carving out the wall of a cave so that you could cover the entrance to the extradimensional space with a boulder, which we could move aside once we were ready to leave. The DM, of course, got very tired of our casters constantly blowing things away with high-level spells and then resting, but it took him a while to do anything about it. (I was trying to warn these guys to back off, since I could see the writing on the wall, but they weren't gonna listen.)
One time, we were in this den of crazy mutant dragonwrought kobolds - the nastiest kobolds without class levels I've ever seen, but still kobolds, and still tricksters and trappers. We casters burned away a large group of them with high-powered spells, and someone called a rest. So a quick Stone Shape pulled a boulder out of the wall, we cast Rope Trick, and took a nap. When we tried to leave, the boulder wouldn't budge. The kobolds had found it, and used sovereign glue to stick it in place. Finally impatient, one of the other casters decided to blow the boulder away. The boulder shattered, but the kobolds had rerigged some supports to it - destroying the boulder collapsed the tunnel on top of us. And while we pick ourselves out of the rubble, an army of kobolds starts lobbing fire bombs on our heads.
They stopped the Rope Trick cheese. ^_^
This question popped up on another thread: http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=1145364&page=8 but I felt a new thread should be started since it wasn't really all that relevant anymore to the discussion on the original thread. For the purpose of this argument, it was assumed the PCs had found the BBEG's base. In short, my argument was:
PCs can control the amount of encounters / day to a fairly reliable degree.
When attacking the BBEG's base, they can simply retreat once the wizard has expended most of their higher level spells. The BBEG will be unwilling to commit many troops to pursue because he doesn't know the PCs aren't just a diversion. A couple of lower level spells or a scroll can ensure their escape or that they remain undetected. They can then either try a different approach to direct confrontation, or wait a couple of days before attacking again. If the BBEG flees then they have at least inconvenient him and may be able to ambush him or his minions as they retreats.
Varia argued that the BBEG would be willing to commit troops since if the PCs can do damage to him, they are not a diversion. Failing that, he can send his kitchen staff to harass then and prevent them from getting a good night’s sleep. If the PCs force the BBEG to flee they have failed because he is still at large and most loot will be either taken or destroyed.
I was just wondering what others felt about this issue.
The BBEG will be willing to commit troops if you've damaged him, as if you rest you'll just be able to damage him again. Likely if you attack again, he'll have collected everything more together/have a better alert system so it will be one or two big messy encounters of everything else left put together.
Fundamentally, you cannot attack, then rest, then attack again and expect things to be the same; that is a very unrealistic assumption. The BBEG may pursue you or he may flee, or he may change his defenses so they're better the same way, but you cannot strike, then rest, then strike again and expect to be able to rest a full day after every encounter.
I didnt say the players could never run off and rest, just that they shouldnt be able to rely on it, and should have to take significant precautions to do so. I liked the group getting creative with their rope tricks that a previous poster mentioned, forinstance, although no mention was made of anti-tracking precautions.
But as I said, the monsters, unless unintelligent, WILL respond in some way, and there are only a few ways they can. They can attack, defend, flee or (as I originally forgot, and a poster in this thread reminded me, thanks.) they can bamboozle/distract. Attack, defend and flee I think I already covered in the parent thread, and I stand by those, as it seems the posters in this thread do too, but I forgot bamboozle/distract so I'll do that here.
The poster who reminded me about this option mentioned the idea of distracting the players with another enemy, real or manufactured by the villain. This can be another real enemy in the area, or it can be something that wasnt an enemy till the villain attacks it disguised as the players (IF he knows what the players look like), or it can be a manufactured enemy, such as documents carefully left where the players will find them that implicate someone/something the players cant ignore as being involved with the plot in a time-sensitive manner. Implicating the local sheriff or lord or important merchant can be fun, especially if the villain knows enough about the framed victim to construct a plausible involvement for them, and can concoct a story that doesnt give the players time to investigate quietly before having to react. Perhaps the local sheriff has a habit of meeting the wine merchant out on the road before he reaches town since he's out on patrol in that area anyway, to get the best pick of the merchants stock. Imagine the fun if the documents the party find suggests that the sheriff will be picking up a powerful but very perishable elixir (something the players would want to use themselves) hidden in a wine bottle at a lonely rendevous that very evening, to be taken directly to the secondary base. Cant you just see the players running off to the rendevous to attack the merchant or sheriff for the elixir (the sheriff just bought a bottle of wine, the document is true!), or trailing the sheriff back to the secondary base in his house or the watchhouse etc?
Or, if cheap is the order of the day, then you could perhaps have fun with double the cheap- The party goes and rope-tricks somewhere. When they come back they find the villain has gone. Actually he's just hiding out in a rope-trick of his own till the party gives up and leaves. Its only a lvl 2 spell, after all, so having enough wizards available to cast enough for all his personell isnt that hard... Or, for the defense variant, his elite assault squads just hide out in their rope tricks above a conventional fortified spot till the party attacks it at what seem to be acceptable odds, and suddenly, presto!, ninja attack from above/behind at very much unacceptable odds. Just a thought.
As was suggested by another poster- if you really want to see what a villain would do if attacked but not destroyed by a party, just do it to a players home base, and see what they do. Maybe find someone not involved in your current campaign and run some hypothetical situations by them and ask how they'd react. It wont be just sitting around inert, I assure you of that.
I'll scribble more later. For now my dinner is ready.
If you're going after static dungeons, leaving and returning the next day may cause you to be ambushed or otherwise hit by prepared defenses, or it might cause monsters at a higher alert level so that you wind up with several encounters landing on your head at once, but assuming you can survive at least one encounter, you can still pretty much take your time, unless there's some external source of time pressure.
If, however, you're dealing with an active threat, you usually have a time limit. If the Evil Wizard is going to open a gate to Hell in three days, the PCs can't spend four days stopping him. If the orc warband is dragging off slaves after attacking a village, they're not going to stop and wait for the PCs to rest. And so on.
Generally speaking, I find stopping active threats more heroic than simple dungeon-bashing, and thus results in limited PC control over encounters per day.
I've seen more than once where the party that cast Rope Trick woke up to find a fairly large 'welcoming committee' waiting for them to come out and play.
If you know where it is, much nastier option: cast dispel magic on the rope trick, and suddenly you have sleeping unarmored PCs who get to start the fight with a 30' fall.
A second item from the source thread- Bags of holding are, or were in my day (1.0), common items for players to have. Has that changed in 3.5? I ask because again, back in my day, putting an extra-dimensional space inside an extra-dimensional space (like, say, a bag of holding into a rope trick...) was a Very Bad Idea (tm), with a bag of holding into a portable hole being the classic example. That specific example is still specifically mentioned in the DMG under the relevant items. Does anyone disagree with the idea that as soon as the party has one of either item in their possession that using rope trick suddenly becomes... unwise.... ?
I mentioned dispelling the rope trick in the source thread, but the OP wasnt sure it could be dispelled.
The window explicitly exists in the material plane, and rope trick is not a spell with instantaneous duration. Per Dispel Magic, 'If an object or creature that is the effect of an ongoing spell (such as a monster summoned by monster summoning) is in the area, you can make a dispel check to end the spell that conjured that object or creature (returning it whence it came) in addition to attempting to dispel spells targeting the creature or object. ' The window in question is an effect of rope trick, and is present within the area of the dispel magic; ergo, it can be dispelled.
The window explicitly exists in the material plane, and rope trick is not a spell with instantaneous duration. Per Dispel Magic, 'If an object or creature that is the effect of an ongoing spell (such as a monster summoned by monster summoning) is in the area, you can make a dispel check to end the spell that conjured that object or creature (returning it whence it came) in addition to attempting to dispel spells targeting the creature or object. ' The window in question is an effect of rope trick, and is present within the area of the dispel magic; ergo, it can be dispelled.
It hadn't occurred to me that it was possible to dispel a rope trick but it makes perfect sense now I think about it. But, the rope trick still needs to be found, and a 1st level spell negates all mundane tracking attempts at tracking for 1 hour per level, and there are other options for escape, especially after 9th level if you have a wizard, or 7th if you have an artificer.
As for the heightened security, well I do feel the DM will need to consider why the BBEG didn't already have them in affect. I mean, if the PC returns and there are more traps, where did they come from? Were they armory? Why haven't they already been set?
Admittedly, my argument isn't now sounding as water tight as it did earlier in my head, but I still feel I have some valid points.
Finding the window- detect magic will reveal that something is there. See invisibility will reveal it nicely, and, if inside the lair, the whole "sweeping the area with long poles" will do it too, if push comes to shove. If theyve gone outside not too close to do it then the rope trickers become a lot safer, pending the tracking thing. It seems to me that the window created by rope trick is subject to locate object too, come to that, no tracking involved, if the party is careless. Speak with plants/animals might be informative too to determine if the group left or not, although it suffers from the druid/ranger/bard limitations too.
Nothing is fool-proof of course. If a party is careful then they can likely get away with rope-tricking, provided they cover their tracks and do it a couple of miles away.
Teleporting or wind walking is a whole other kettle of fish, but if the party is that level then the enemy probably is too and thats an extra level of nastiness and options the villain has to prep for their return.
But remember, if the party does succesfully disengage to rest up, that at best merely reduces the villain to one of the other 3 options- fortify, flee, or hide. It doesnt end the affair.
Extra security- its not already in place for the same reasons military bases arent always on maximum alert. The involved measures almost always reduce the smooth functioning of the facility so its counterproductive to have it up all the time. It usualy uses more resources to maintain it, leaving fewer for doing your normal job. The personell cant maintain heightened vigilance for ever- eventually people either get tired and burned out, or revert to being sloppy/lazy.
Traps arent always deployed because you have to live in the place. Its seriously inconvenient, and asking for nasty accidents, to have to negotiate a trap every 5 feet when youre just trying to go down the hall to the bathroom. If there is an area that is never used and thus extra traps wouldnt be a problem, why isnt it walled up instead? Much more effective. Where do they get these traps? We're not (usually) talking about official built-in traps like poisoned needles in door locks etc. We're talking homicidal-boyscouts-run-amok stuff here- fun with ropes, rocks, logs, iron spikes, stakes, old knives, buckets of kitchen or bathroom wastes etc, so all the materials are likely just lying around the lair or just outside it. You've probably seen Conan the Barbarian and remember the helmet/wooden stake trap they rigged up in that. That kinda thing. (and if not, go to youtube and search "Conan fights thulsa dooms generals", at the 5 minute mark)
It hadn't occurred to me that it was possible to dispel a rope trick but it makes perfect sense now I think about it. But, the rope trick still needs to be found, and a 1st level spell negates all mundane tracking attempts at tracking for 1 hour per level, and there are other options for escape, especially after 9th level if you have a wizard, or 7th if you have an artificer.
Sure. I didn't say that it isn't possible to disengage (if you do it well, rope trick isn't even necessary), just that rope trick, by itself, is beatable.
As for the heightened security, well I do feel the DM will need to consider why the BBEG didn't already have them in affect.
Same reason as always. Being at high security is annoying and interferes with your ability to do normal work. If there's a known threat that's worth the cost; if there isn't, it often isn't.
As for the heightened security, well I do feel the DM will need to consider why the BBEG didn't already have them in affect. I mean, if the PC returns and there are more traps, where did they come from? Were they armory? Why haven't they already been set?
There is a (generally) particularly apt reason that I don't think has been mentioned yet. Most BBEG strongholds are fortresses, dungeons, and the like, right? Those are designed to defend against armies. PCs are SWAT teams, SAS, Rangers, etc - special forces. You can't defend against them the same way you defend against armies, and they're significantly more difficult to defend against until you know specifically what you're defending against.
A decent BBEG (and by extension, the DM) would have a plan ready for a group of approximately the PCs' disposition - whatever that may be - but you don't want them out all the time. Traps can be triggered by those who know about them; spells require occasional recasting; and, more to the point, any traps, security, or other effects can be scried from safety. Keep them out for any length of time, and anyone with a good Magic-User and some free time who wants to take you out can figure out where all your traps are set.
Also, smart BBEGs use tricks like send out 3 teams: one to gather recon on/sabotage the PCs, another to harry PCs and retreat, and a third waiting at a trapped area for the harriers to lure the PCs to.